Sunday, 31 January 2010

Rasputin was castrated during his assassination at the hands of a gang of angry nobles in 1916. But, according to rumor, a maid found the bodiless member at the crime scene and saved it. During the 1920s a group of Russian women living in Paris acquired it (or acquired something that they believed to be his penis) and worshipped it as a kind of holy relic, while keeping it inside a wooden casket. Rasputin's daughter, Marie, didn't like the idea of her Dad's penis hanging out with these women, so she demanded the thing back. And it presumably stayed with her until she died in California in 1977. It then disappeared for a while until it came into the possession of Michael Augustine, who found it tucked away in a velvet pouch along with some of Marie Rasputin's manuscripts that he bought at a lot sale. Augustine sold the well-travelled penis to Bonham's auction house who then discovered (surprise, surprise!) that what they had bought was not a penis, but instead a sea cucumber.

The Russian Museum of Erotica, newly opened in St. Petersburg, now claims to have the penis of Rasputin.